{"id":8665,"date":"2019-07-25T14:34:30","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T18:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vault217.gmu.edu\/?p=8665"},"modified":"2019-08-26T13:01:42","modified_gmt":"2019-08-26T17:01:42","slug":"student-reflections-teo-rogers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vault217.gmu.edu\/?p=8665","title":{"rendered":"C-SPAN and The Abyss – A Philosophical Look at Viewer Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post was written by Teo Rogers, Digitization Student Assistant for the C-SPAN records Digitization Project.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2026for\nwhen you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.\u201d
\nFriedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil<\/em>,\n1886<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            When Nietzsche penned this famous aphorism, he probably\ndidn\u2019t have viewer mail to C-SPAN in mind as something that the abyss could be\napplied to. But, here we are, 133 years later, and the abyss is staring back at\nme ever so intently. That doesn\u2019t mean that this abyss is, as the OED defines\nit, \u201cthe great deep or bottomless gulf\u201d or \u201cthe infernal pit.\u201d This abyss is\nbuilt on the fears, the anxieties, the appreciations, and the personal\nhistories of thousands of people across the globe. Yes, that\u2019s right;\napparently, C-SPAN was pretty popular in Norway and Germany in the early 1990s.\nThis abyss has personality\u2014not all of it sweet and cheery\u2014that tells whoever\ndares peer into it a great deal about life at the edge of the 20th<\/sup>\ncentury. This abyss just wants a friend to get to know and understand it, and I\nam that friend\u2014and how.          <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Of course, I knew none of this before my first major adventure\ninto archival work began. I started working with the C-SPAN Project at the SCRC\nin March. I was interested in the position because, as a folklore student,\narchival work is one of the potential avenues that my career can take me on.\nArchival work is not necessarily something that one would equate with folklore.\nArchives are important to folklore because we work with, talk to, and document\nconversations with people about their customs, traditions, stories, music, art,\nwhatever, through interviews or film. We need a place to keep this all safe, so\nestablishing, maintaining, and placing them in archives is absolutely essential\nto folklore as a discipline. It\u2019s not over yet, though! Because we love data so\nmuch, we need to keep data about our data\u2014this is called metadata, and also\nwhere my friendship with the viewer mail abyss developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The boxes containing the viewer mail are kept in an enviably\ncool room, along with the rest of the archival materials that the SCRC guards\never so valiantly. Walking through this room evokes a certain air of mystery,\nof some arcane knowledge privy to a select few embodied by 19th<\/sup>\ncentury books of Russian fairy tales, 18th<\/sup> century cookbooks, and\nother such materials. But this was not my charge. Instead, as I pulled open the\nvault-like shelf holding the C-SPAN collection, I beheld the abyss for the\nfirst time. Box after box leered back at me like some cardboard tribunal,\nfollowing my anxious gaze at every turn. Charting the abyss would be no easy\nfeat, and the boxes were elucidating this through their sheer preponderance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            But I had a job to do. Fearlessly, I grabbed a box,\nstrolled out, and never looked back. At my desk, no words were shared between\nus, but the silence spoke immeasurable volumes (and because a box has no orally\ndiscernible language\u2014maybe when it was a tree). \u201cBox,\u201d I said (telepathically,\nof course), \u201cyou will reveal your lines of metadata to me, or else!\u201d Despite the\ngeneral futility of threatening an inanimate object into action, the box\nlistened. Little did I know, the box had A TON of metadata for me to translate\ninto my fresh spreadsheet. Only a little bit daunted, I pulled up my sleeves,\nprepared my fingers for the typing that was to come, and set out to conquer the\nabyss, line by line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Soon, the abyss\u2019 defenses were crumbling, as subjects\nlike \u201cAuthor,\u201d \u201cCity,\u201d and \u201cLetter Summary,\u201d fell from the letters in the boxes\nand onto the computer screen. Hubristically, I assumed that this abyss was some\nshallow puddle. These first letters, though, were surface-level barriers,\neasily overcome. All of a sudden I was inundated; the abyss had lured me in\nlike an anglerfish. Its attacks were fiendishly protean. Thirty-page economic\nmanifestos, surrealistic scenes promoting marijuana legalization (I think),\ndisturbingly convincing evidence of a Hollow Earth, denigrations of Anita Hill,\nand oh-so-many requests that James \u201cBo\u201d Gritz, a peripheral Democratic candidate\nduring the 1992 election, be interviewed on C-SPAN for his unbeatable\npatriotism. I was a little overwhelmed, but did not back away. Did Columbus\nturn back halfway across the Atlantic? Did those swarms of conquistadors turn\ntail at the first sight of impenetrable jungle? No! And I would be the abyss\u2019\ncartographer without the genocide, deception, or smallpox!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The viewer mail, in all its iterations, was relenting in\nits ferociousness\u2014or maybe, as Nietzsche warned, I was becoming too accustomed to\nthe cursive ramblings of the retired and\/or the unemployed. However, the abyss\nwas also making something very clear to me: it just wanted somebody to\nunderstand it. Much of its contents reflected very real anxieties,\nfrustrations, and solidarity with issues still relevant today: the economy,\npolitical polarization, immigration, war, poverty, drugs, gay rights, etc. Even\nsome of the figures are the same, from Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders to Rush\nLimbaugh and Newt Gingrich. Understanding this more sensitive side of the abyss\nmade my quest less of a conquest and more of a friendship, kind of like John\nSmith\u2019s development in Pocahontas.<\/em> In\nthis case, the \u201ccolors of the wind\u201d consisted of complaints regarding captions\nbeing too hard to read and meticulous close observations of bias revelations,\nbut the point stands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The abyss and I have developed quite the friendship. We see each other every day. I commiserate with it over current events and, through the letters, can literally see history repeating itself. It tells me more and more about itself with each box, with each line of metadata. Sometimes we get irritated with each other\u2014I can\u2019t tell you how many paper cuts I\u2019ve gotten\u2014but what friends don\u2019t? True, it may be odd to befriend an etiological concept in the guise of letters to C-SPAN, but maybe that\u2019s what Nietzsche actually meant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow Special Collections Research Center on Social Media <\/em>at our Facebook<\/a>, Instagram<\/a>, and Twitter<\/a> accounts. To search the collections held at Special Collections Research Center, go to our website and browse the finding aids by subject or title. You may also e-mail us at speccoll@gmu.edu<\/a> or call 703-993-2220 if you would like to schedule an appointment, request materials, or if you have questions. Appointments are not necessary to request and view collections.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post was written by Teo Rogers, Digitization Student Assistant for the C-SPAN records Digitization Project. \u201c\u2026for when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.\u201d Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886             When Nietzsche penned this famous aphorism, he probably didn\u2019t have viewer mail to C-SPAN in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101014,"featured_media":8668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[558,5,121,784],"tags":[348,753,626],"class_list":["post-8665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digitization","category-scrc-interest","category-scrc-picks","category-studentreflections","tag-c-span","tag-metadata","tag-student-reflections"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vault217.gmu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/abyss.jpg?fit=1280%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8Ep5i-2fL","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8671,"url":"https:\/\/vault217.gmu.edu\/?p=8671","url_meta":{"origin":8665,"position":0},"title":"A Journey Through C-SPAN’s Viewer Mail","author":"Amanda Menjivar","date":"July 31, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"This post was written by Brandan Culbert. 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